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2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Gaming

TECHNOLOGY AREA: GAMING
Innovators: University of North Carolina-Greensboro
& Southern Adventist University

:: Innovator: University of North Carolina-Greensboro

D'ES IT MAKE economic sense for ECON 201 students to return to their alien planet?

Challenge Met

Educational games have been used effectively
for years to supplement traditional
teaching. But at the University of North
Carolina-Greensboro, they’ve turned an
entire course into a game, incorporating all
the elements of effective education: content,
communication, interactivity, application, and
assessment.

Spurred by a need to boost “less than stellar”
success rates in traditional economics
courses, a dedicated team of more than 30
faculty and staff from the Department of Economics
and the Division of Continual Learning
(DCL) collaborated on the development of
a game called REGEN. Robert Brown, UNCG’s
dean of continual learning, cites two main
reasons they turned to gaming: the intrinsically
engaging and motivating nature of
games; and the belief that the application of
knowledge—the way learners apply knowledge
to advance in a game—is essential for
both comprehension and retention of theory.

By deciding to commit to the game-ascourse
format, the team seized a tremendous
opportunity to demonstrate that gaming is
indeed an effective pedagogy. This fall
semester, students can earn three undergraduate
credit hours for taking ECON 201 entirely as a game.

How They Did It

Despite the obvious inferences, gaming is
not child’s play. Economics is a difficult discipline,
and the developers created the
ECON 201 game format to teach economics
as a way of thinking. Students learn by doing
as they play the role of leader of an alien
species that crash-lands on a futuristic,
post-apocalyptic Earth. As the students
build a society and evaluate whether or not
they should attempt to return home, they
learn to understand tradeoffs and deal with
issues such as scarcity, savings and investment,
supply and demand, market failures,
and sustainable growth. To progress in the
game, students must anticipate consequences
and make decisions based on logical
economic analysis.

The large interdepartmental development
team received the oversight and endorsement
of both Brown and Economics Department
Head Stuart Allen. Key team developers
included Assistant Dean of Continual Learning
Nora Reynolds, DCL Director of Online
Development Scott Brewster, and Economics
faculty member Jeff Sarbaum.

To accelerate development, REGEN uses a
two-dimensional environment with 3D images
added only as needed for operability, with
some layering to give the illusion of 3D. To
save programming time, the team relied on
commercial applications as much as possible.

Most entertainment games allow players
myriad gameplay choices, but REGEN focuses
its players on a central mission. The players
are given optional paths to explore their
micro-world, but not unrestricted roaming or
multiple side missions that could potentially
distract them. The game environment is
retained at all times; students are not
required to leave the game to work on academic
problems.

Next Steps

After the initial course offering this coming
fall, the team will conduct assessments
of student performance and design a
research project on gaming effectiveness.
Further, they’ll incorporate learning objects
from the game into other courses and
begin to create a second course based on
gaming technology.

Brown comments on the potential for gaming:
“Games will be the next big advancement
in education, because educators are going to
learn how to tap into the power of gaming to
motivate and teach students. It will require a
tremendous change in thinking by educators.
Most of us enjoy teaching by lecturing. The
classroom is a stage, and we’re all performers.
But if we value learning more than teaching,
we’ll start to adopt gaming techniques.”

Advice

The team’s best advice: Estimate the time
and effort you think game development will
take, then double it. Better yet, triple it.

:: Innovator: Southern Adventist University

Challenge Met

Two years ago, when Dan Lim was hired by
Southern Adventist University (TN) and
charged with revamping the institution’s
online learning programs, finding a way to
engage students in learning was a big priority.
But so was helping faculty embrace technology.
What Lim brought with him from the
University of Minnesota-Crookston was a lot
of experience in working with faculty on learning
technologies—and seven years’ development
of Flash Learning Games Generator.
Both skill sets would allow him to help faculty
easily create online games in multiple,
interchangeable formats.

Now dean of the virtual campus and
director of online learning and faculty development,
Lim explains his mission at Southern
Adventist: “I wanted to bring about some
culture change among the faculty. I wanted
to convince them that teaching and learning
drives technology; that we can build technology
around how faculty teach and how
students learn.”

Lim rolled out Flash Learning Games Generator
2 on
campus, to support gaming and simulations
in both campus-based and online courses.
The generator helps Southern Adventist
instructors create games in their disciplines
without the need for technical or programming
skills. Educators can spend their time
solely on content generation and produce
games in a matter of minutes. A variety of
gaming objects allows them to provide students
the same interactive content in several
different gaming formats, so that the
students themselves can choose how they
will learn.

The games have become immensely popular
with students,who even collaborate while
interacting with the games. “They get others
to play with them, or encourage each other to
try them out,” says Lim.

How They Did It

The project was driven by the Office of Online
Learning, working closely with faculty. The
learning game objects were built using
Adobe’s Flash. The learning game generators
were created with PHP, for web-based deployment,
and in Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET,
for standalone PDA deployment. Flash was
selected as the gaming platform for its ubiquity,
animation power, and robust scripting.

The game objects are designed to get students
“hooked” on interacting with difficult
learning content. Multiple levels of content
randomization provide what students perceive
as “fresh” content, providing concept
reinforcement with less apparent redundancy.
Students often want to play again and again,
moving from one challenge to another. There
is adequate content in the data bank to support
hours of playing.

Lim takes advantage of a monthly technology
faculty showcase to spread the word on
campus about the learning game generator.
He comments,“The faculty have exceeded my
expectations in the way they embrace technology.
There’s nothing like a faculty member
to influence another faculty member.”

Next Steps

Currently, Lim is completing the rollout of
the PDA version of the game generator. “The
PDA/mobile game engine will have a farreaching
impact due to its portability, mobility,
and ubiquity,” he says.

Beyond that, Lim is working to identify
more gaming objects. He explains, “Educators
should have hundreds of gaming objects
available to them that are intuitive to learning.
And in the future, game pedagogy, popularity
rankings, and usage statistics should
be included with each game object.”

Lim is also planning to use WebCT’s PowerLinks to integrate
with the school’s WebCT course management
system. With an integrated question
bank, future content creators who use the
CMS will only have to enter the data once.

Advice

Lim’s advice for learning game developers is
to focus on developing reusable game objects
so that they can benefit a wider spectrum of
faculty. He notes, “Content is king: If students
don’t learn much, games have very little value.”